1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and system for document information management, and more particularly to a method and system for document information management which is capable of generating a human-computer interactive document sheet which allows a user to retrieve relevant information at a remote site.
2. Discussion of the Background
A so-called paper-less office is one recent rapid-growing trend in an office environment in which various computer-based systems for document information management have been improved to increase efficiency and productivity of office tasks that handle a considerable amount of document information. The paper-less office is resulting from recent advancements in computer and human-computer interface technologies as well as in computer networking, and generally indicates a phenomenon that conventional paper-based documents are being replaced with electronically generated documents on computers.
A conventional paper document and an electronic document are two different forms of a document; one printed and the other electronized. It is obvious that the electronic document has many advantages. Firstly, it is easy to create an electronic document on a computer. Secondly, the electronic document can easily be corrected, filed, copied, generated on demand on a recording sheet, and so forth. To do this, a variety of convenient document processing functions have been developed. On top of it, a great advantage that accelerates the paper-less office trend is the capability of data transmission via computer networking lines, by which the document can be transmitted to other locations without having to be reproduced.
However, the electronic document also has crucial disadvantages despite its ease of use. Disadvantages lay in a lack of connectivity to actual office practices which normally proceed with the paper document, a lack of portability to any place where there is no computer, and so on. In many cases, the electronic document is reproduced on a recording sheet to be used for actual office practices. Therefore, both the electronic document and the paper document inevitably need to coexist and may selectively be used depending upon the requirements of the actual office practices.
However, the above-mentioned differences between the electronic document and the paper document result in the following problems.
Once an electronic document, generated and controlled in a sophisticated document information management system, has been output on a recording sheet, the paper document loses linkage to all the advantageous information such as address information, security information such as a password, link information to other documents, and so on. Since the paper document has no direct bridge to the electronic data, a user needs to use a data entry unit such as a keyboard to access the data. A hyper text, which is explained below, also loses its advantageous information when it is output on a recording sheet.
Hyper text is a well known concept of a multimedia software and includes a plurality of electronic texts that are arranged in a hierarchical structure and linked to each other; each one of the texts can be referred to in an arbitrary order through the link structure. The hyper text includes normal text information and information for linkage. When output on the recording sheet, the hyper text loses the information for linkage and is no longer a hyper text. The hyper text is a concept effective only within the electronized document on computer, and there is no idea of such a hyper text that can be effective on a recording sheet.
Japanese Patent Publication number 09-091301 (1997) discloses a document information management system which generates a human-computer interactive document sheet that can bidirectionally communicate with human and computer.
There are several ways to access and to output an electronic document. As an example, a widely practiced way on the computer is opening a window for a list of documents that are stored in the file server, for example, finding a desired document on the list, clicking the desired document, and then the desired document is output on a recording sheet. Another example is to use a search program for searching for a desired document by a key word, for example.
These ways to access and to output an electronic document require a computer at the user site. However, there is a desire to access and to output an electronic document without a computer at the user site.
To respond to this desire, an apparatus including an electronic filing function, a facsimile data transmission function, and a document token generator has been developed. In this apparatus, when storing a document using the electronic filing function, all the pages of the document are printed out in a reduced-size image into an at-a-glance chart which is called a token, so that one can easily mark a desired page on the chart for selection. The chart with the mark is then read by the apparatus and the desired page is retrieved.
Although this apparatus makes it possible to access the computer files using a paper document, a problem is on the chart itself; the chart is a kind of dedicated mark sheet and can not be used for a plain document in general. Further, this apparatus has several inconveniences in use. For example, to obtain a document token, complicated operations are required by a user. As another example, this apparatus can retrieve the document only in units of pages but not in units of words, sentences, and so forth. Moreover, this apparatus requires more paper of the tokens to keep in addition to the pile of normal document paper.
Further, there has been developed a technique for information security in which a user is required to write a password on a sheet; the password is then checked and it is determined if the user has a right to access. However, this information security has a problem; a password needs to be hidden normally but it is on the sheet in this case.
As mentioned above, the document information management system disclosed by Japanese Patent Publication number 09-091301 (1997) generates a human-computer interactive document sheet that can bidirectionally communicate with human and computer. However, this system has no way of retrieving an information file by a user from a remote site using a popular telecommunication apparatus such as a facsimile apparatus, for example.